Category Archives: Uncategorized

Minnesota’s MCA scores were released today, and there’s plenty of analysis spinning around, though it’s hard to claim much real change from last year.

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Health insurance companies have to pay more than a billion dollars in rebates this year, because they didn’t spend at least 80 percent of premiums on medical care. According to the Chicago Tribune:

Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies are required to spend 80 to 85 percent of the money you pay in premiums on actual health care. … Insurers that don’t spend the prescribed amount have to issue rebates.

Is that an unreasonable amount to spend on actual health care? Well, take a look at what Medicare spends on administrative costs. Continue reading →

Books in boxes, books on shelves, and book people everywhere — that was the scene at the inaugural poetry reading at SubText, St. Paul’s newest indie bookstore. David Unowsky brought his cow, and many friends, to the first of a weekly Wednesday reading series he has organized for this summer. Poets Carol Connolly, Shannon Gibney, Ed Bok Lee, Jim Moore, and Juliet Patterson read in alphabetical order. Forty or fifty of us occupied an eclectic selection of comfortable chairs, and we enjoyed the wine-and-cheese welcome and relaxed atmosphere. Continue reading →

I couldn’t pronounce the address of our apartment — Dessewfy utca 22. I learned, eventually, that there are 47 characters in the Magyar alphabet, which may explain why I can’t pronounce anything. Magyar also has different words for “red,” depending on the temperature of the word. Not the color or shade — but one word would mean the passionate red of blood, while a different red would mean the red of a roof or something “cooler.” And that made me wish even more that I could understand the language. Continue reading →

Budapest is a lovely old European city, built and rebuilt as tides of war and armies swept over it, from the conquering Roman Empire to Attila the Hun to the Ottoman Turks to the German occupiers, Allied bombers, and Russian armies of World War II. The city is bisected by the Danube (Duna) River, with Buda on the west one side, and Pest on the east. The government buildings are on the Pest side (as was our apartment), with other castles and churches on the Buda side. The Pest side is flat, and the Buda side rises to a mountain height, which must have been the more defensible ground, as it’s easy to see the fortress-like structures ascending the mountainside. All of the bridges connecting the two sides were destroyed during World War II, and later rebuilt. Continue reading →

Ron and I went to Amsterdam on our second day, to see the Jewish Historical Museum (left) and the Portuguese synagogue. They are across the street from on another, near the center of the city. Across a second street is a large church, the Church of Moses and Aaron, and an open-air market. Continue reading →

As soon as we arrived in Utrecht and stowed our luggage, Macy led us out to the Domtoren, just a few blocks away, and then to lunch. We all sampled Loffel beer, which is excellent, and enjoyed an excellent lunch. Some of the guidebooks say that the Dutch do not make very good salads, relying heavily on iceberg lettuce. That’s true in cheaper places across the countries we visited, but not in good restaurants like this one. When I get home, I will acquire goat cheese and make good salads with goat cheese medallions and balsamic vinegar. The photo shows Ron drinking coffee, in the approved-by-Annette manner, pinky finger lifted.  Continue reading →

Depart MSP at 1:10 on May 16. Flight time: 10 hours and 45 minutes

Arrive Amsterdam at 6:55 a.m. on May 17

That was the plan. Then we got to the airport, and Delta informed us that our passports were not good for the trip. Continue reading →

Bikes rule in Utrecht. The parking lot next to the train station is a bike lot, filled with hundreds of bikes. The streets have bike lanes, and people walking and on bikes clearly outnumber cars in the center of the city. Some streets are closed to cars, entirely or at certain hours. Parts of the street along the Oudegracht (Old Canal) are even closed to bikes during the times of heaviest pedestrian traffic. Well — theoretically, they are closed to bikes all the time, but, as our daughter has discovered during her semester in residence, the Dutch are very pragmatic, so when the foot traffic is light to non-existent, people ride instead of walking their bikes.

And those times would be early mornings — shops don’t open until 9 a.m. — and in the evenings. Almost everything closes by 6 p.m., except for restaurants. The Dutch work fewer hours than any other country in the European Union, and far fewer than in the United States. A good idea, I think, especially if that means more time for biking.

People bike everywhere and for everything, with bike carriers for children (sensibly in front of the bicycle, rather than following behind), dogs, extra passengers (riding sidesaddle on the flat carrier behind the bike seat. A variety of baskets and panniers hold everything — bags of groceries, books, bunches of flowers, baguettes. Some bike handles are adorned with ropes of synthetic flowers, which makes it much easier to spot your bike in the parking lot.

The omnipresence of bikes, buses, trams and trains in the Netherlands contrasts sharply with Minnesota’s barely-there transit. A typical trip: walk a couple of blocks to a bus stop, where an electronic sign tells what buses will stop there and how many minutes the wait is for the next bus. We have been in central cities, so I expect the bus service is better here than in areas farther from the center. We have never waited more than five minutes for a bus, even on the weekend. Our longest wait time was about ten minutes for a train from Utrecht to Amsterdam.

In the Twin Cities, I walk a little over half a mile to get to the nearest bus. The schedule posted at the bus stop is usually correct, but there’s no way to know whether there’s a traffic jam or slowdown. The Central Corridor, after it’s completed in 2014, will be another mode of public transportation, with the nearest stop at least 3/4 mile away, and no connecting bus line for us.

In comparison, the Netherlands seems like transportation paradise. Of course, biking is easier here, with completely flat land, contrasting with Minnesota’s hills. The weather is considerably more moderate, too, with freezing winters but not nearly our snowfall accumulation.

Bikes are not for everyone, at all ages and stages of life. My carpal tunnel syndrome came back a little, even with the easy, no-gears, no hand-brakes biking I did today, and that’s minor compared to the mobility problems that lots of other people deal with daily. I don’t believe that biking alone, or even biking and public transportation, are the only answers to transit. Traveling here, though, I realize how much better we could do.